Tunatown Dreaming Moerewa 1979

Working with imagery related to Te Tai Tokerau,
his Ngapuhi turangawaewae, artist Shane
Cotton has, for over 20 years, produced
landscape paintings combining historical and
contemporary elements.

For him, there can be no geography without
history, and his works indicate some of the ways
in which the land was already a narrative before
he came to represent it.
Never merely illustrations, Cotton’s paintings
make meaning through many layers of complex
symbolism, and often include profiles of the
Northland coast and the sacred maunga
(mountain) Maungaturoto.

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From his Black Out series based on Penetana
Papahurihia’s nationalist movement of 1835
whose followers met in darkness to summon
spirits, this painting has organic shapes emerging
from the night like paintings of The Dreaming
which inform and narrate Aboriginal
consciousness. These shapes appear as if dreamt
by the occupant of the tent at the bottom of
the painting.

Centrally placed is a Ngapuhi writhing eel
form, perhaps the nakahi or spirit which appeared
to Papahurihia in a flash of light as he slept,
symbolising a vision to be fulfilled. Orbiting
around this are a black robin, a swivel table, a
couple dancing, a pair of supplicant hands, and
an inverted tree. Texts referring to the inside and
outside of things written in Hongi Hika’s alphabet
surface like speech bubbles: “Ke ana waho, Ana
roto pu”.

Written across the bottom of the painting, the
title is the most transparent text of all. It points
to events which took place in 1979 when, in the
words of Mäori Party MP Hone Harawira,
Moerewa became a little town with a big
reputation.

In July of that year, a Black Power member
from the area assaulted a member of the rival
Storm Troopers in Auckland, and around 50 Storm
Troopers travelled north to Okaihau on 3 August,
looking for revenge. Wrecking the hotel where
they had been drinking, they confronted the two
police who tried to intervene, before moving on
to Moerewa, where they destroyed a fire engine,
fracturing the skull, face and jaw of a police
sergeant as they tried to throw him back into the
van which they had set alight. The Storm Troopers
finally dispersed when police shot one of them in
the leg. Later, half of the group were convicted on
charges ranging from grievous bodily harm to
criminal damage and sentenced to between four
months’ and eight years’ imprisonment, making
this the most serious gang-related incident ever
to have occurred in New Zealand.

Moerewa had grown from the relocation of
Taitokerau-wide Mäori who had become landless
by the end of World War Two, and were moved
into abandoned American transit huts. This
settlement came to be known as Tuna Town, as
the operations of the Allied Farmers Freezing
Company (AFFCO) there led to the development
of a thriving population of tuna whakakeke –
the silver bellied eel – in the nearby river.
While it boomed in the 1970s, the scaling back
of AFFCO in 1994 led to mass unemployment for
the population, which is 80 percent Mäori. By
2001 when this painting was made, Reverend
Ngahau Davis had revitalised the town again.
Cotton remarks: “The only way to move forward
is to come to terms with what has happened…
revisiting can bring clarity to our own existence
in the present”, and attempts to demonstrate this
with a depiction of Moerewa as a place with a
future, as well as a past.